National Stamping Month at Close to My Heart

Greetings from a beautiful Spring morning in Christchurch, New Zealand. The first day of Spring and the sun is shining gloriously in the sky. We are making the most of it as the weather for this month is supposed to be rubbish! A great month for spending lots of time indoors and stamping like crazy.

To celebrate National Stamping Month, Close to My Heart has put out a lovely stamp and die set with a focus on Christmas and Thanksgiving. Here in New Zealand we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but the images on the stamp set are so appropriate for a lot of uses, including thanks cards and cards for children. This set is only available in September this year.

The full set comes with both stamp sets as well as two thin cuts dies to cut the window pattern shown in the left picture and the tag to go on the front of the card.

If you want to know more about this set, contact me by leaving a message on this blog or through my Facebook page here.






Here are a couple of Christmas cards I put together using the set. I used a stamp positioning tool to stamp all the images on the background layer before attaching the window card to the front. All the images were heat embossed.

I used gold embossing powder on this card and Candy Apple CTMH card for the window frame.

For this card I used silver embossing powder and CTMH  Willow for the frame. Unfortunately Willow is not now available in the CTMH selection but there are other beautiful green colours that can be used instead.

Love Blossoms

Love, love, love the Love Blossoms card workshop available this month from Close to my Heart.

The kit makes 12 cards and envelopes with enough materials left over to make the layers for at least another 6-8 cards. You can buy additional cards and envelopes to complete them.

The stamp set that comes with the workshop is stunning too. It includes the beautiful floral stamps as well as the shading for the flowers and a wide range of greetings.

The workshop is available until the end of March so if you are interested, please let me know. 

A New Year - 2019

Another new year - already into February and I have not posted anything yet!

Well I have actually been making cards this year and here is one that I did recently for one of my lovely neighbours.

I was very happy with the colours I used for this card.  I made the card base from Slate cardstock and layered with Sorbet (both Close to my Heart base colours) and one of the patterned papers from Charlotte, a Close to my Heart set from a couple of years ago.

Finished the card off with the die cut from AliExpress and the stamped sentiment, also from CTMH. Pearls added the finishing touch.

The inspiration for this design was from Pinterest. 

Stay posted for some more cards I have done recently!

Cards, Cards and more cards!

So much for good intentions! Yes I said I was going to try to post something regularly, but I didn't promise!!

I have spent the last couple of days cutting and glueing to make some cards to try to use up some of my rather large stash of papers from Close to My Heart. I found a really nice set of cards designed by one of the CTMH Consultants, Gail Gross using the Whimsy Collection from the 2017-18 Annual Inspirations book. The cards used about a quarter of the pack of 24 papers and made 16 cards, all of which are pictured below.

I have to say that the pictures do not do the cards justice! The colours are much brighter in reality.




I used flower stamps from the Beautiful You stamp set and cut flowers from the Cricut Flower Market Collection, available from your local CTMH consultant!

2018 A New Year!

A New Year means a new start! At least I hope so...

I don't set new year resolutions as I never end up keeping them but I do need to start blogging again regularly as it makes me think more creatively and action my thoughts about what I can do.

I was asked to make some cards recently so I thought I would share these.

I used a Make it now card from Cricut Access and changed the wording on it.

The card is all from Close to my Heart and I used a pen to write the wording with the Cricut Maker.

This was a special birthday card for a little three year old who loves buses. I used the Cricut Maker to cut the bus from card then layered it on paper from CTMH. I used the pen in the Maker to write the words on the side of the bus.

I really like this card and have made it a few times before, but this time I used patterned paper from CTMH for the coloured layers.

I stamped the sentiment using Thistle coloured ink to match the background layers.

I added white faux stitching to the hearts to make them a little more defined.








Watch this space for more posts this year!

Happy Birthday Cards!

This week was our regular meeting for the craft group I set up when I retired about seven years ago.
The group is still going, even though some of the people have changed, there is still a few people who keep coming. They are really nice people and I treasure their crafting friendship and company.

For our meeting this week, I made up some card kits using papers from the Jack, No Worries and Hello Lovely collections in the recent Close to My Heart Seasonal Expressions Ideas book.The designs for the card were based on designs in the Happy Times Card Workshop created some time ago by Michelle Snyder for CTMH.

For the first card, I used paper from the Jack collection along with ruby, juniper and white daisy cardstock. The trim is black and gold.
The stamp is from  the Birthday Sparkles set, B1537.

















The second card used the No Worries collection, with white daisy. I also used the zip strip from the striped sheet for the flags on the side of the card. I stamped two daisies using the May SOTM (S1705) and canary ink, and the leaves from the same set in New England Ivy.  I coloured the images and cut them out, layering the daisies and adding a sequin to the centre. The sentiment is from the Birthday sparkles set and I stamped that in Sapphire.









The last card we made was the most popular one. The paper is from the Hello Lovely collection and I teamed it with Sorbet, Fern and Colonial White cardstock. I also used Fern twine,  green shimmer trim and sparkles to finish the card. The flower was stamped using Sorbet ink and the image is from the May SOTM as are the leaves, stamped with New England Ivy. The greeting was also stamped with New England Ivy.  

Is it really that long since I have posted something?

It seems like ages since I posted anything on my blog and as I was going through some photos, I found pictures of some of the things I have done since Christmas!

For my grand-daughter's birthday, I made this canvas using different coloured vinyl. The canvas measured about 10 inches by 20 inches.

I used ideas from Google images and set it out using Design Space and some of the different fonts I have access to through Design Space.

I cut the words using my trusty Cricut Explore and different colours of vinyl.

It took quite a while to set it out on the canvas and to get the lines straight!

Grand-daughter loved it and it will be interesting to see, now that she has started school, how long it takes before she can read it herself!